Your Insurance Grid

In order to effectively manage your insurance affiliations and allow your front office and billing departments easy access to this information, you should create a simple Insurance Table. This can be updated as needed, but should contain the insurance ID numbers for each physician in your group as well as the plan requirements for timely filing of claims.
I always found that managing and billing for your physicians was ultimately easier if you assigned your physicians numerically. I did this by seniority or hire date and as each new physician joined our group, they were assigned the next numerical place. This made it easier for the billing staff and came in handy for me when I prepared the monthly practice demographics.

A sample of your insurance grid could appear as follows:

Insurance     Timely Filing     Doctor 1     Doctor 2       Doctor 3

Aetna             60 Days            Tax ID       Tax ID          Tax ID

Blue Cross     45 Days            B6221        B6222           B6223

GHI               30 Days            G1100        G1100          G1100

You should update your grid as needed and as applications are accepted and ID's are assigned to each physician. Each front office employee should reference copies of the grid whenever they schedule a patient appointment. This is especially true for new patients and if some doctors in your group are non par with a plan and the patient does not have out of network benefits.
Remember that you may not be able to enroll your physicians in every insurance plan offered in your demographic area. Commercial insurers will often gauge the number of providers in your area and close their panel to new applicants when a certain number of physicians have contracted. This is often the case for specialty practices.
In addition to your insurance grid, you should store a copy of each plans fee schedules for reference by your billing department. All practices should perform a monthly audit for each of its affiliated plans. Using the Explanation of Benefits provided with your remittance, CPT codes should be checked against the fee schedule to assure that commercial insurers are honoring their contracted rates, or for errors in your remittance checks.